Careers at Amicus

Leveraging our mission to hire top talent.

It’s hard to recruit great developers. With many options at hundreds of other startups that offer the same perks, getting top tech talent is a lot of work. About a year in, I had an idea for a possible new jobs page that would set us apart.

The concept was that you could either do good (for instance, by volunteering) or do well (with a high paying job). At Amicus, though, you’d have the unique privilege of doing both. We offered the perks of a funded startup along with the satisfaction of working towards social good.

This messaging could be great in two ways. First, we got to offer a perk that most other companies couldn’t replicate—a real mission. Second, developers with whom the message resonated would pass part of our criteria off the bat.

I decided to chart out Do Good and Do Well with two blocks side-by-side. As a candidate scrolls down the page, the blocks morph into circles and converge and form a Venn diagram. As they finish converging, the words turn into Do Both. The circle stops at our logo, forming Do Both at Amicus. Then, after the hook, we can dive into both our perks and the good we do.

I sketched it out and built a prototype. Here’s a video:

The parallax prototype for the jobs page.

For the content, I illustrated some Lego minifigures. I felt they were generic enough to work with Amicus and well-loved by most of our target audience.

In hindsight, these lego characters aren’t quite as generic as I thought. The default minifigures, regardless of intention, represent white men. Without more varied representation this page could make it harder to build a diverse culture.

A rough sketch of what the header might have looked like.

The entire process took about a week. Unfortunately, this was one of those projects that fell by the wayside. The final product would have required a significant investment of resources. In the end, we decided to focus on projects of higher priority.